Minnesota Native News: Public Safety Concerns in South Minneapolis & Gotham City

Minnesota Native News: Public Safety Concerns in South Minneapolis & Gotham City

STORY #1 - MUID WORKING FOR SOLUTIONS FOR PEOPLE STRUGGLING WITH HOMELESSNESS AND ADDICTION

In South Minneapolis, urban Native leaders are focused on public safety concerns tied to people who are homeless and using opioids on the streets.

Reporter Melissa Townsend tells us more.

At a recent community meeting I met Abel [geb-reh-hee-wut]. He works with the Indigenous People’s Task Force Needle Exchange. The program is on the ground in the Phillips neighborhood in South Minneapolis. They offer many services for intravenous drug users, including handing out clean syringes in exchange for used ones.

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Abel and his co-worker Mo Mike also do sweeps around the neighborhood - most mornings and most evenings. Today, I’m along with Abel today.

ABEL: This right here is the first place we’re going to stop. Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center - they have a park for their kids and often times what we noticed is that any place there is somewhere to sit , if you can’t be seen from the street, that’s where people will use. (:20)

He has a silver bucket and what I’ll call a grabber, like a metal pole with a mechanical hand on the end. He doesn’t want to touch the needles on the ground.

[clink] ?

ABLE: I kind of keep my eye open for the orange caps. And if we find an orange cap then a syringe is probably near by. And there goes another one eyeing me down right there [clang in the bucket]. (:17)

Hepatitus C and H-I-V can be transmitted from sharing a needle or from being stuck by a used needle. So collecting stray needles help stop the spread of the disease and keep people safe.

ABEL: We don’t want the kids to climb over people or even have to watch every step for syringes and that’s really a big part of why we started doing the sweeps. (:10)

We walk down the block behind All Nation’s Church. There are a handful of needles on the ground, lots of orange caps. And someone is laying under several blankets in the corner. Abel whispers:

ABEL: [whispers] We’ll probably just go around him.

We’ll probably just go around him. He says normally he would check to make sure the person was alive and then he would ask him to move.

ABLE: In a situation like that it kind of breaks my heart because you don’t want to shoo them away to nowhere.

Abel doesn’t feel good about telling people to move — because he knows there’s no. where. for them. to go. There is some frustration that these problems persist after all the attention that was given to the tent city that was in this area last year. But urban Native leaders are meeting intensely to figure out what they can do now. And they are engaging city, county and state officials on how they can contribute to the solution.

MARIE: Gerry Zink is 16 year old. He’s Mnicoujou [mini-CON—joo] Lakota from Cheyenne River. And he’s a comics aficionado.He has recently started posting his movie reviews on Facebook. And today he shares his review of a blockbuster film out in theaters now.

The movie “Joker” is a great, thought-provoking character study of Arthur Fleck, and his descent into the sociopathic Joker. If you are expecting Joker to be a superhero movie, then you are going to be surprised with how darkly character driven it is.

The film stars Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck, a working class clown performer who has dreams of becoming a comedian.

In the beginning, we see some of Arthur’s more disturbing sides, but he can still control them. As the movie progresses, however, we see what social isolation, backstabbing, and abuse can do to a person like Arthur. He becomes more disturbing. The movie wisely does not stylize, sanitize, or justify Arthur’s horrible deeds. The violence is genuinely unnerving and hard to watch.

Joaquin Phoenix is incredible in the movie. He embodies the loneliness, social isolation, and mental disorders that make Arthur such an interesting character. He is somewhat sympathetic, but Arthur is a sociopath and the movie doesn’t mask that. Because the story is told from Arthur’s perspective, it’s up to the viewer to interpret wheather different scenes are real or not. This gives the film an amazing ambiguity that will be discussed for a while.

The only problems with the movie have to do with the fact that it focuses so tightly on Arthur Fleck. There’s not much depth to the supporting characters. The motivations of many of the side characters are intentionally unexplained.

The movie is also a complete deviation from the version of the Joker from other media. If the movie wasn’t called “Joker”, there would be very few connections to the Batman franchise.

In conclusion, I think “Joker” is a game changer for comic book movies. It is an incredible, standalone character piece, that is still able to offer up a great critique of society. I give the movie 9 out of 10.

MARIE: That was Gerry Zinc, the 16 year old Lakota comics enthusiast with his review of “Joker”.

This week on Minnesota Native News we hear about what urban Native leaders in South Minneapolis are doing about public health problems connected to people who are homeless and using illicit opioids, and Gerry Zink shares his movie review of “Joker”.

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Red Lake Nation College: Student success & connecting with community

In this installment, producer Tammy Bobrowsky talks with Cassy Keyport, Director of Library Services and Tribal Archives at Red Lake Nation College. This past year has been the first year in their new facility and they’re making strides toward student success and connecting with the community.